Janine Guillot, CEO of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), who spoke at a recent seminar on sustainable investing, noted that while people tend to draw contrasts between different sustainability organizations, they have more commonalities than differences, and she emphasized that they can, and frequently do, work together.

Speaking on July 23 at "Addressing Investor Calls for ESG [Environmental, Social and Governance] Reporting and Assurance," held by the AICPA, the SASB and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, Guillot noted that the different organizations actually complement each other, given their areas of focus. This is especially the case with framework organizations, such as the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), with regard to standards organizations, such as the SASB.

In this case in particular, she noted that the GRI and the SASB focus on different matters, but neither contradicts the other. The GRI, she said, is a broad framework designed around identifying a company's social, environmental and economic impacts and providing that information to all stakeholders. The SASB, on the other hand, is a standards organization that identifies the subset of that information which is material to financial performance, with a focus on investors.

Standards, she said, are specific detailed requirements for disclosures, which tend to be more metric-based and quantitative, while frameworks are more macro level in that they provide principles-level guidance on how information should be structured and what broad themes should be discussed.

"Standards and frameworks can be used together, since [frameworks offer] higher level principles guidance, and standards can be used to put meat on the bones of frameworks. We often see [the Climate Disclosure Standards Board framework] and SASB used together, or GRI and [the International Integrated Reporting Council framework] used together," she said. "You can use standards in a complementary way."

Guillot also talked about how encouraged she was by recent moves by the European Union to revise its nonfinancial reporting directive to better account for ESG factors. While the review is still ongoing, she said that "the most important thing" revealed so far has been the concept of "double materiality," which combines financial materiality—"that is, how do ESG issues impact a company's financial performance"—and environmental and social materiality—"which is how do a company's actions impact the environment and broader society." She said that this concept can serve to enhance the ways that the SASB and the GRI framework can complement each other.

"Because that's exactly how these standards were designed," she said, "with the SASB focused on day one around financial materiality and the GRI [framework] designed for a company to think through its impacts on broader society."